by Scott Simon
“I know,” said Sunny. “I feel like a local coffee shop competing against the international chain.”
“But their sister Karen gave a couple of thousand to you, alderman. A Yello executive named Gurkeerhat Singh gave you $2,000. You know him?”
“Maybe we shook hands on a subway platform. A name like that— must be a Punjabi. I'm Tamil. Do you know every member of the Montreal Canadians hockey club? Being white guys on the same continent and all.”
Brooks Whetstone turned away from Sunny's taunt by wrenching a chunk of rye bread from a wedge that had been placed between them. Sunny could see two or three caraway seeds fall onto the bar. As Brooks spoke, Sunny blotted one of the seeds with his finger.
“So what could cause a stranger to give the legal limit to someone he doesn't know?”
“Issues,” said Sunny firmly. “Imagine—a smart guy like that actually paying attention. Maybe he likes my position on taxes, city services, or tax abatement on the fifty-two hundred block of Sheridan Road.”
Brooks Whetstone daubed a crust of his bread in a smear of mustard and halted it just before his lips to tell Sunny, “Mr. Singh—and Karen Nygaard—and a few other names I'm sure we could find—gave contributions to you. This baffles me. You would think that all Yello executives must be passionately interested in doing favors for the founders of the company. Who have a strong interest in doing favors for the mayor.”
Sunny widened his eyes and smiled, as if listening to a four-year-old count to twenty by missing every other number.
“Yello has the money to buy the moon,” Sunny reminded him. “It gives money to hospitals, gospel choirs, one of the world's great symphonies, and the Polish Sports Hall of Fame. Every politician would oblige Yello. Even Greens and Wobblies.”
Sunny had heard Sgt. Gallaher come up behind them during his last few words and turned his head just as she had stepped into place behind his shoulder.
“The chief,” she said, just loud enough for Brooks Whetstone to hear. She held out a small black department phone. Sunny nodded at Brooks Whetstone and took a couple of steps farther down the bar as he held the phone to his ear.
“Alderman Roopini, there may be a development,” Chief Martinez said in a measured monotone. “The man we have been questioning at the Eighteenth. He now says he was in the vestibule where the stack of pizzas was waiting to be picked up by the mayor's security detail. He says a woman kept asking which one was the mayor's. She said she was a big fan. The man admits that she gave him three twenties to pop the top of the box. He says it was open just a second. But …”
Sunny kept his voice low, but turned toward the U.S. Attorney, who listened as he seemed to absently review the brown ranks of Gold-wasser and Rumpleminze bottles behind the bar.
“Yes. Time enough.”
“We're pulling receipts, flashing photos,” said the chief, but then added, “You have to know this, sir: the suspect suffered cuts and contusions during interrogation.”
Sunny could feel his neck redden and his ears boil. That was police parlance for “holding court on the street.” A man that police had to chase down an alley who took a blind shot at them would predictably suffer cuts and contusions in the process of being apprehended. It was their way to ensure that any attempt to harm a police officer would receive swift reprisal before some myopic jurist could interfere.
“You were supposed to put mints on his pillow, Matt,” Sunny curtly reminded him.
“The cuts and contusions were self-inflicted. Sir,” he replied equally.
“There's a special place in hell—not Dubai, Matt—for a department that breaks this case but gets it thrown out because they couldn't keep their hands in their pants.”
“The suspect is at Weiss Memorial. We have a recording of everything. Our people are clear. I'll keep you informed, sir. On all counts.”
Although the police chief clicked off with no further niceties, Sunny could feel the fever of Brooks Whetstone's vigilant interest from several seats away. He improvised a farewell into the phone.
“Thank you, chief. Please proceed as we discussed. Official business,” Sunny finally raised his voice in explanation to Brooks Whetstone, as he kept the phone at his side and nodded to Sgt. Gallaher to resume her stance.
“I appreciate your time,” the U.S. Attorney said as Sunny inched back along the bar. He slowly drew out seven or eight sheets of ivory stationery with the blue and gold city seal, and fanned them across the bar.
“I don't think these letters indicate anything illegal, Mr. Roopini. By themselves. But I think they may help us crack a code.”
He ran a thumb across the sheets of paper; lightly rubbing the raised lettering that said OFFICE OF THE MAYOR.
“We put them under a strong light. We've had cryptographers go over them, letter by letter. What if you string together every second consonant? Every third vowel? Is there some hidden message? What if the mayor was writing one letter in ink—the one we can read—but hiding a second one between the lines by writing with lemon juice?”
“Hold it over a candle,” Sunny told him. “My daughters did that in the second grade. Sorry you missed it at Stanford.”
Brooks Whetstone smiled cheerlessly.
“So all these notes from the mayor asking people to do something,” he began. “Hire this man. Don't give money to that man. ‘I would regard it as a personal favor.’ They mean exactly what they say?”
“What else?”
“The mayor sent notes to you?”
“Every alderman. For the opening of a community center in Hum-boldt Park. A new library in West Englewood—”
Brooks waved off all further examples as uninteresting, like hearing about a choice of salad dressings at a diner.
“Personal ones,” he stressed.
“Like when my wife died?” Sunny spoke softly, so the slap in his voice could be plain and flat. He watched Brooks Whetstone step back slightly and reach a hand over to press his fingers lightly on the coaster below Sunny's beer.
“No,” he said softly. Then, “No,” more firmly. “I meant the ones asking you for something.”
“What can an alderman do for a mayor?” asked Sunny. “He had my vote in his pocket. He had me in his pocket. There've been lots of people that wanted to run. Better, richer, smarter. Lawyers, professors, real community leaders. Younger and cuter, too.” Sunny picked up his glass and took a small sip from the dregs. “But they all backed away because people said, ‘He's close to the mayor. He gets things done.’ The mayor had to write letters asking for my favors? How quaint. All he had to do was lift a finger.”
Brooks Whetstone held the brown envelope out between them, so that the top flap came out just under Sunny's chin. Sunny even heard a scratch of stubble rub against the edge.
“All that devotion,” said the U.S. Attorney quietly, “And he couldn't care less—it meant absolutely nothing—when it counted. Now you know what kind of man he really was.”
But when Brooks Whetstone turned his gaze from the mirror to his glass on the bar with no further comment, Sunny began to laugh; he laughed so hard that he began to shudder and had to catch his breath, wipe his eyes, and clear laughter from his throat like a clutter of leaves.
“But you don't, do you?” he finally croaked. “You've just invested— what, a year? Two? And I'm sure enough money to pay for a good infielder. The oaths you had to give the Justice Department that all the court orders and special spending bills would be worth it because you were going to reel in a whole net of king salmon. And now, you're left just reading a bunch of letters, over and over, like some mooning teenager, trying to figure out why the mayor wrote a instead of the.”
The white-capped glass was set down softly as Sunny reached into a pocket and pulled out three twenties to slip below his own empty glass on the bar.
“You were going to bring down a whole rotten temple of scoundrels. Now, you might be lucky just to snag a couple of sleazy building inspectors. It's what reporters do, too, Mr. W
hetstone. You puff up fools like me to make it look like you're doing battle against dragons.”
And then Sunny raised a hand in a crabbed, reptilian claw and opened his mouth, as if to bare fangs.
“Hahhh,” he rasped softly.
Brooks Whetstone leaned forward deliberately and took the new glass steadily in his hand, tipping it slightly toward Sunny. The full white foam fell forward until half an inch flopped over and a driblet of beer trickled over Brook's unflinching knuckles. Brooks flexed the fingers with which he gripped the glass in turn, one, two, three, and four, as if counting down before speaking.
“I always find our conversation stimulating, alderman,” he said.
In the ninth recorded hour of the interrogation of Carlos Ponce, aka Zambrano, Reyes, Rios, Contreras, Alomar, and Uribe, at the 18th District station on north Larrabee, a mommy and daddy team named Barry and Cindi had grown annoyed and exhausted. The subject twitched, scratched his pants, and pulled on his nose, as if tugging on a pin that could adjust the features on his face. He had gnawed his nails until the tips of his fingers dripped spit.
Worse, he had asked for a lawyer. A man had only to watch television to know that, and Carlos Ponce had traveled through courts and prisons the way some people drove up to Wisconsin every year to watch the leaves change colors.
Cindi and Barry had fended him off with reassurances. “We're just talking,” Barry told him. “You help us, we can help you. A man with your background could use a little help,” and they actually got him to say—interrogation camera purring and a milk-cheeked young state's attorney watching through the glass—“Okay, no lawyer now. I answer your questions, I get to go, no other trouble 'bout nothing.”
Every hour, Carlos Ponce repeated that he had seen nothing—not nothing unusual, or nothing out-of-place, just nothing, he insisted, in stocky, heavy, stop-and-go sentences.
“You don’ see. People, they don’ see you. I'm just some guy 'gainst the wall. Some guy, picks up what they leave.”
“Ever find anything?” asked Barry.
It was a question they brought back every hour or so, to see how faithful Ponce stayed to his replies. In the first hour, he had devoutly denied finding so much as a crumb among the litter and tumble of a vacated table. By the third, Ponce recalled that he occasionally skimmed a tip.
“Maybe once, twice a week, I see somethin’ somebody don’ miss, maybe. May-bee.”
“Food?” asked Cindi, and Carlos Ponce waved the question away as too obvious.
“Course, that. People leave two, three slices. Nabieh and Tannous don’ mind.”
“I used to waitress,” Cindi suddenly remembered in the fifth hour. “The Beef Baron's Barn just off Ninety-seventh. Some of the things they'd find! Teeth, dentures, engagement rings in the blue cheese dressing. She'd go off crying to the ladies room, he'd hurry back before the cab could come, put on a sad-dog face and ask, ‘Say I wonder if you found …’ Funny thing, but if a couple was there to break it off, it usually happened during soup or salad. If the guy brought her there to pop the question, he couldn't get the nerve to ask until dessert. Nowadays, I wonder—maybe you know—with gay couples, how they figure who's going to ask whom? Some people left eyeglasses, keys, coins, rubbers, pictures, beepers.…”
She used her right hand to put the list in the air between them, emphasizing each word with her index finger.
“Anythin’ I find, I turn over,” he said flatly. “Can’ use it any-no-way Keys? You don’ know the apar'men. Glasses? I don’ need. Wallets? Cards you can’ use, only little bills, and pictures of people you don’ know.”
“Sounds like you thought about it,” Barry observed.
“This all about a credit card?” asked Carlos Ponce.
In the seventh hour, Carlos Ponce repeated that he never followed the conversation of the people whose plates, cutlery, and castoff possessions he cleaned from the tables, because he couldn't hear it over the blare of the television over the bar, and he couldn't be less interested besides.
“Maybe if P'elope Cruz walks in, I lissn’,” he said. Barry began to squirm with pique.
“Not if you were the only man left in the uni—” he began, but Cindi held him off with the palm of her hand.
“Well what if Penelope Cruz motioned you over and asked, ‘Carlos, my dear, what are they talking about at table six?’” she proposed. “What would you say?” She was bargaining that in answering the hypothetical, he would have to resort to the specific.
“Table six that night?” said Ponce. “I thin’ I change it three times. All guys I could'n understand.”
“They weren't speaking English?” Cindi asked earnestly. “Spanish?”
“Computer shit,” Carlos Ponce explained.
“Table three?”
“No’ mine.”
“Two?”
Carlos Ponce eyes widened.
“A couple. Eigh’ to nine-thirty maybe. Fighting. ‘Bout sumin’ named Lola.”
“Hola!” said Barry.
“I thin’ her mother,” said Ponce, and Barry sank back in his chair.
The officers departed to confer with their lieutenant and the young assistant state's attorney in the small anteroom on the other side of the glass.
“He's getting too vivid now,” said Barry. “He's about to remember that they were plotting to rob the Royal Bank of Scotland.”
“He's tired,” said Cindi. “His defenses are down.”
“Or he's tiring us out with shit,” snapped Barry.
“Your analysis is noted,” said the lieutenant coldly, and slapped a palm on the back of his neck to clear his mind and call the room to attention. Lt. Delbert Tompkins had been in the basement of the station, save for a dozen cigarette breaks, since shortly after nine a.m. Saturday morning. His mouth tasted of ash and rubber. His eyes burned as if he had to blink sharp gravel out of them.
They agreed that there was one play left, and returned to the cold, bright room. Cindi looked down at a sheaf of papers and made a mark with a pen, as if she had noted some small something that could be clarified with a comma or period.
“Table nine?” she asked, almost sweetly.
“Couple of girls,” said Carlos Ponce. “Brown hair, long. Other short and dark. Just un'er the TV, I didn’ hear much.”
“Gay or straight?” asked Barry heavily, and Carlos Ponce turned to smile.
“Who know? I don’ see them go down on each other,” he said, and sat back with satisfaction at the way his joke had left his interrogators aghast.
“Of course,” said Barry, in a bored monotone. “Or maybe that's what you have to say, because women never look at you.”
“Girls fin’ me,” Ponce smirked. “Like birds fin’ flowers.”
“Like flies find turds,” Barry suggested, and then stood up brusquely. He brought his arm down hard, as if drawing a steel door over the mirrored window.
“Turn that camera off. Turn that fucking camera off, do you hear? I am tired of hearing this cocksucking, motherfucking, sonofabitch lie to us!” He stood in front of the window and swelled his chest as if to stop a bullet—or a cannonball. “Off, off, off!” Barry bellowed.
(In fact the camera that recorded interrogations could not be turned off once engaged. Police wanted to be able to attest to prosecutors and judges that they could not stop and start a recording; it authenticated a confession's integrity. But Barry and Cindi bet that Carlos Ponce's experience was not so extensive as to include this nugget of knowledge and would therefore assume that whatever followed was intended to escape the scrutiny of honest judges, conscientious defense attorneys, and the Tribune.)
Barry leered down at Carlos Ponce.
“My God,” said Cindi, cringing. “You're not going to hurt him, are you?”
“Hurt him?” Barry demanded. He picked a lone pastel pink chair up by its poured plastic back and threw it into the cinder-block wall. It fell back, disconcertingly undented. “Hurt him? Hurt him?”
This time Barry
picked up the pink chair by its thin tin wire legs and smashed the back hard against the cold concrete floor. The fluted pink shape of the seat stayed upturned, like a set of mocking lips. Barry wrenched the thin wire legs apart with his forearms. The tip of a leg fell off, unsheathing a sharp edge just below Barry's chin.
“I wouldn't dirty my hands!” he bellowed. “I would only catch the clap from choking him to death! I'm going to call in fucking professionals!” he said, and finally jerked the two rear legs of the chair into a sincere if inexact X. “His fucking legs will be sticking out of his throat! His throat will be sticking out of his ass!”
(SC2000 Four-leg Y series plastic stack chair, Barry thought to himself. List price $64.95, and they take it out of my next paycheck if this doesn't bust something. He had paid for a couple in the past.)
Cindi knew her turn, and crouched in front of Carlos Ponce on one knee. If he was reminded of a prayer card, so much the better.
“Please,” she implored. “Please.”
The room's steel door flew open and clanked against the wall. A well-built man with a steely black beard wearing a black leather coat stepped into the room in lustrous, creaking black boots with tall, sharp heels that clopped off each step. He wore wire-rimmed sunglasses in the ruthless overhead light, kept his arms crossed across his chest, as if locking down some secret ingredient, and looked down at Carlos Ponce with scorching disdain.
“This is Colonel del Aguila,” said Barry. “Of the Federal Security Directorate in Mexico City. You know them? The Seg-oorr-idad Fed-eee-ral?” Barry pronounced the Spanish title as if reading off the name of a small town on a map of Iceland.
Cindi turned her dark head down toward the floor. It approximated the silhouette of a biblical mother weeping though, at this point in their sketch, she usually had to bite back laughter.
Colonel del Aguila was actually Sergeant Leo del Aguila of the Mounted Police patrol on west Huron (“We Stay in the Saddle Longer” was the unit's motto—to be sure, unofficially so—and they sold T-shirts and refrigerator magnets with that inscription). His guest performances as a Mexican police colonel were booked several times a year at various north side station houses, as much for the authenticity of his glossy riding boots as his gruff beard and graying glower.